The Nehor

Yet the case you brought up shows the exact opposite of this as the “trans idealogists” don’t want her prosecuted and this whole situation isn’t about compelled speech at all. You are just ranting your usual talking points no matter how irrelevant they are because you are really obsessed with villifying transgender people for some reason. May want to look into that. And obsessed with queer people in general. LOL, LMAO even.

This.

Yeah, the normal Greco-Roman conception of the material world was that it was good but not perfect because nothing material can be perfect. In some forms of gnosticism the material world is just completely and utterly bad. There are lots of different creation myths in gnosticism but they aren’t happy stories.

Saying the Christians got it from the gnostics is a little odd. The gnostics were Christians. I would say the proto-orthodox Christians got it from the gnostic Christians. The gnostic/non-gnostic divide in Christianity wasn’t very stark at first and there is a lot of problems with the gnostic category in general. While some of them had similarities a lot of the gnostic groups weren’t very gnostic in many ways so it gets tangled and confusing.

Oh, and in case with all the Lawrence v. Texas stuff you were asking my position on the case I am pro-sodomy. And i mean sodomy in both the modern sense where it is tied up with stereotypically gay activities and the much earlier sense where it means any kind of sexual activity beyond the bare minimum of what is needed to impregnate someone. I am in favor of both.

No, it is pro-slavery. It endorses it and prescribes it. The only objections to slavery are in the context of slavery is bad when it is done to our people by other people or when it is done in ways that violate our laws. That is a simplification since the Bible isn’t a unified text speaking with one voice but you can find passages that endorse slavery and none that declare it to be an evil unless it is talking about Israelites being enslaved by other people where it is wrong. It is also not an anti-slavery book so agree there. Parts of the Bible can be read as being opposed to capitalism, particularly some of the prophets lambasting the wealthy who were acquiring all the land. The Torah has a kind of economic reset every seven years that is semi anti-capitalist but it is doubtful this law was ever put in practice. In the New Testament you do get passages that suggest capitalism is pointless but those are usually from people who expect some kind of divine intervention to be imminent in which the whole world order will be overthrown and put right by God so difficult to make much of them when said divine intervention hasn’t happened.

You are confusing two things here. 1) People get fired for deadnaming and using non-preferred pronouns which does happen because if you are a jerk at work you tend to get fired. 2) People getting criminally penalized for misgendering someone in day to day life or deadnaming then. By comparison if I were to change my name to Stan and someone insisted on calling me by my old name they could get fired for it by their boss if I complained. Also your fearmongering about this is dumb in general. If there is anything to be afraid of it is the authoritarians in our midst looking for groups that they can deny rights and legal protections to. Once they find groups they can do that to that creeping into our society will destroy us. You are consistently on their side as they attempt to do this. Then take it up with the Norwegian legal system. Neither transgender civil rights defenders nor the alleged victim of this crime want this person punished. Punch at them. Stop punching at transgender people who ARE NOT DOING THE THING you claim to be troubled about. You are being deliberately dense. The police are involved because the alleged perpetrator WANTED THEM INVOLVED. So you are pivoting from saying this is a horrible thing that she is being investigated at all to this is a brave thing as she set this up to challenge the law and failed miserably. The comparison is invalid. She could have instead mimicked the last person who was prosecuted under the law for transphobic speech in Norway. Look that up and try to defend it if you dare. Not really. It is pretty obvious. You have to do all kinds of contortions and repost misrepresentations regularly and often to spin this as ambiguous. Again, in that case she failed miserably. Pick a lane. Is this a horrible travesty that should never have been considered at all? Or is it a brave stance taken to deliberately win a day in court? You keep jumping between the two to cope with the evidence not supporting the former and you are making things up to make the latter fit the narrative while holding on to the former. And again there was basically no chance of that happening and the three years thing isn’t something that was ever going to happen so you can stop hanging on that. Here is what happened for a much worse violation of the law: No three year sentence for saying much worse. Don’t worry. You can erode liberties here. America really shouldn’t be smug about the First Amendment somehow leading to superior outcomes over free speech with hate speech carve outs. *looks around* We’re not doing that well with it. I still like to believe the First Amendment approach is better but this really stupid country seems hell bent on disproving the idea. As a Latter-Day Saint, I think we should punch fascists. Uneven way? Oh please, you haven’t shown some big uneven standard. Someone was investigated for something that they deliberately wanted to be investigated for and nothing happened and you are treating it as a harbinger of horrors to come? I would say you are paranoid but it is more likely that you just want to believe this. Strategic attempts to challenge laws can be good or bad. Lawrence v. Texas was carefully constructed to challenge a constitutionally unsound law. Rosa Parks is another famous example of this. The Norwegian system doesn’t work quite this way and the comparison doesn’t hold. Also if she was trying to challenge the law legally she is terrible at it. That wasn’t her goal. She wanted publicity. She got it. She fooled you and a lot of other people into thinking she was the hapless victim of the evil transgender menace. Even when it is shown that the people publishing this stuff were deceiving you you are still flailing about trying to pick up the pieces and assemble some kind of rationale for why she is the hero. This kind of thinking is poisonous. You should be angry. They are talking down to you. They are treating you like you are stupid and feeding you false narratives. Doesn’t that annoy you? How are you okay with this? Seriously, how are okay with this? I would never listen to such a source ever again. Where is the love of truth? Where is evidence-based rationalism? So you are on the side of the trangender activists who don’t want her prosecuted. You’re getting into bed with everyone then. Hooray! And please don’t think you are somehow kind for not wanting me to be prosecuted for saying that fascists deserve to be met with violence. I stand by it. If that troubles you then good, I guess. Maybe it should. Yet you only talk it about when it involves those icky gross trans people for some reason. And I am reminded that Twitter has become an authoritarian hellhole. Thanks for the reminder.

And there isn’t even any involved with “trans ideology” whatever the hell that is. https://www.newsweek.com/tonje-gjevjon-trans-men-lesbian-transgender-norway-1768161 She wanted to be investigated at least. It keeps her in the news. And what did the target of Gjevjon’s hateful social media post say? As I said it was self-inflicted. Also it has been four years and no charges have come so far. Though I can’t find any follow up it is probably safe to conclude the investigation was concluded and no charges resulted so Gjevjon was successful. She cast herself as a martyr and stirred up fear and hatred amongst transphobic people and the whole thing died with a whimper that no one noticed and her imagined persecution was nonexistent. She played transphobes by telling them a carefully curated story that flattered their bigotry and they swallowed it with no critical analysis whatsoever. Just took it at face value because they are so hard up for real stories of persecution that flimsy made up ones are all they have so they carefully try to avoid breathing near their house of cards. Then they run off to the next flimsy construction and imagine they are the victims in some kind of horrific war. It is kind of sad really.

Statements you quoted in a new post less than a day ago that come from a thread you revived by said posting. Don’t commit thread necromancy and quote the dead thread and then disavow that what you quoted is somehow out of date. Sure, I will share my thoughts on this once you share your thoughts on how your heroic lesbian martyr is not a duplicitous charlatan chasing fame through disngenuous and self-created persecution. No, the people paying for the lawyers behind this are. I didn’t say it wasn’t a real lawsuit. I am saying that it wasn’t initiated because a Catholic Hospice wanted to burn money on this. Yet you only seem to care about said speech when it involves treating transgender people with basic dignity. You are allowed to bury your head in the sand about this. I don’t have to pretend your hypothetical is somehow plausible or likely. I note you completely ignored the stuff from Norway except to argue (incorrectly) that the 1st amendment to the Constitution somehow has an equivalent in Norwegian law which it does not. Why did you skip the parts about how the heroine of your narrative about the LGB and T divide was shown to be completely incorrect? Or that the persecution of your lesbian martyr was self-imposed? Or that you were duped by the flimsiest of stories because it told you what you wanted to believe? Are we just going to pretend that whole thing never happened and not reckon with the fact that your favored news sources are lying to you?

And you again take this golden opportunity to uncritically repost and regurgitate propaganda without investigating the claims made in even the most perfunctory fashion. So here we go again. So you are opposed to compelled speech? Well, that is a misleading headline. She is facing criminal charges because there is currently an investigation that may not think charges are appropriate at all. Prediction: These will all be ridiculous. Uh, nope. Most of the aggression is coming from transphobic activists. This is even more stupid. I know the queer community. The Gs have the highest number of transphobes amongst them and it is still very very low. Much lower than can be found in the general population. The lesbian community is largely supportive of transgender people. So is the gay community. The bisexual community is probably the most supportive. There is no fracture in the community. There are some useful idiots who happen to be queer. There is no divide. That is right-wing propaganda designed mostly to assuage the consciences of bigots who want to imagine they are supporting lesbians in their hate. This is, of course, entirely incorrect if you do more than a surface level reading of the upcoming situation you are going to use in this preposterous example. *pause for laughs for this hilarious joke and hope for at least General Conference level audible chuckles offered mostly out of politeness* Stop trying to share a bed with a lesbian. It is a weird thing to aspire to. Knowest thou the condescension of smac? He descended below all things to admit he agrees with a lesbian to kill their common enemy, the marginalized transgender people. Truly a Christlike act. Okay, so what happened? Gjevjon is a know TERF. She has been harassing transgender people in Norway on social media and in person for years. She has a particular bone to pick with Christine Jentoft, a trans lesbian with a child. Hence the “lesbian mother” schtick. So how did this whole investigation start? Gjevjon posted a bit on social media about how “men are men” and deadnamed Jentoft. Then someone (cough) Gjevjon (cough) reported the post which triggered a police investigation into Gjevjon. Now newspapers can say she is being investigated and “facing charges” with scare tactics about the potential prison term being something she realistically faces. So what does Jentoft say about this? She hast stated she doesn’t want Gjevjon charged or prosecuted despite Gjevjon’s regular social media harassment. Prominent Norwegian transgender advocacy groups don’t want Gjevjon charged or prosecuted and have publicly said this. So who wants Gjevjon charged? Probably nobody. Who wants Gjevjon investigated so they can sell this story as a scare tactic revolving around an investigation likely to go nowhere? Gjevjon who is hard at work playing the martyr who no one actually wants to burn at the stake. This is your heroine smac. A social media bully who deliberately triggered an investigation (Gjevjon admits it was deliberate) and has repeatedly badgered Jentoft to take her to court over her harassment and Jentoft isn’t interested. Gjevjon has also claimed that she would have been pressured to transition if she was growing up right now because she was tomboyish. This is without evidence as there is no evidence of lesbians or anyone else being collectively pressured to transition. It is just parroting propaganda. She also writes songs about how she is a hateful terf and claims she is being blacklisted from some venues for being transphobic. She is right there at least. So no, no T picked this fight. An L did. One L. So your generalized statements about the T being behind it and a large fracture aren’t supported at all by the very evidence you uncritically trotted out to support it. I hope you are better at this in a courtroom. You got everything wrong. Stop trusting the media outlets that lie to you. Dig deeper. Didn’t know you were a big supporter of her art. What did you think of her song “Vagina Anthem”? Also the First Amendment, of course, doesn’t apply in Norway. Also it is kind of pathetic to act like you agreeing with a lesbian is such a great divide to cross. You can always find someone of just about any group who will back you up if you look hard enough. And let us not pretend this alliance means anything anyways. If you could you would deny her the right to marry, would want all discussions of lesbianism hidden where no minor could ever conceivably hear of it, and would insist that she just needs to pray and repent and either live a life of celibacy or somehow become straight or do a lavender marriage or whatever. Oh, and you would find her art obscene of course. Oh, and the nuns in that piece are not facing legal harassment. An anti-transgender group picked them as the most sympathetic group available to file the lawsuit. The nuns may not care about transgender people at all one way or the other. I imagine they agreed because it is likely to give them visibility and increase donations. Taking care of people who are dying of terminal cancer is kind of “meh” in terms of winning financial support. Getting bigots to donate to them to applaud their (real or imaginary) fight against the transgender menace probably has the money rolling in. I actually applaud them for grabbing that opportunity. Smart move.

It is mostly down to King James and the anti-witch hysteria of the times that we think of the person Saul consulted with as a “witch”. King James in particular was a fully convinced believer that there was an international cabal of witches (mostly women) being coordinated by Satan as a final outrage before the Second Coming and King James wrote a book attempting to ‘prove’ the existence of witches. By witch I mean in this context a person (almost always a woman) who entered into a demonic pact usually believed to be sealed by participation in some kind of secret orgy with other witches and various demons and that these heretics were out to destroy all of Christendom. It was a full on moral panic. It also moved the magic user from being a sinner into being a heretic which was a big shift. Everyone is a sinner and the cure for sin was a healing matter. Heresy was much more serious and more likely to get people killed. This conception of witchcraft didn’t exist at the time. The “witch” that Saul dealt with was more likely a ritual magic user and a necromancer. I am using the older definition of necromancer where it is a magic user that communes with the dead, almost always to forecast the future. Christians (and Jews) have to go through a lot of contortions to fit this story into a much later cosmology. Christians often retroactively turn these magic users into (witting or unwitting) servants of Satan. What the magic practitioner was doing was forbidden but it wasn’t some kind of especially egregious sin like it appears to later Christians. Sort of anyways. Depending on how the reforms of Josiah worked and the centralization of religious power in Jerusalem it caused it may be that these practices weren’t forbidden back then and that these laws came later as part of these reforms. Then the stories changed to backdate the laws so that Saul threw them all out of the land and then consulted with them. You can find similar disconnects in the story where the protagonists flout the Law and there is a kind of excuse or rationalization pasted on. The most likely explanation for what the story is trying to convey is that this is just a ‘normal’ necromantic divination where the ritual magic user called up Samuel from Sheol (the generally believed in destiny of dead human spirits at the time) and Samuel’s spirit gave a prophecy. Trying to retroactively make it confirmation of LDS temple practice or read into it some kind of too early conception of the honored dead receiving something special in the afterlife.

The late medieval period is not “ancient”.

Yeah, that is why I said if would be the language of the oldest copies we would have over Aramaic.

One thing I am proud of is that I have never engaged in throwing around gratuitous insults. Never. Ever. Never. No, Okay, a bit. Just a little bit. A few times. Sometimes. Occasionally. Only when I thought it was funny. Which is a lot of the time.

I don’t know of any method of communication that works. Take the bit about it coming from God and the Spirt of the Lord out and this scripture seems to sum it up: Moroni 9:4 Behold, I am laboring with them continually; and when I speak the word of God with sharpness they tremble and anger against me; and when I use no sharpness they harden their hearts against it; wherefore, I fear lest the Spirit of the Lord hath ceased striving with them. You see similar problems in attempts to address racial inequality and even things like wealth inequality. It makes a lot of people get awkward and deeply weird. Most slip into being defenders of the status quo while professing a vague desire for things to get better. You get a similar reaction in a lot of discussions about religion and politics where people who seem rational (and are) in other areas of discussion will hold up the flimsiest of evidence or even just an evasion and think the matter is settled. Or, as Calm said, they start softpedaling and trying to moderate to some vague middle ground that may or may not even exist.

Yeah, I know and it is not fair. And also why the “flight or fight” thing has been replaced by the “flight, fight, freeze, or fawn” as responses sometimes with “fine” added in as a coping mechanism after the fact.

Oh please. This isn’t a clinical assessment. “All men are potential rapists” is a factually correct statement from a clinical objective perspective where you only care about the facts. So based on this you have decided to tone police how women think while trying to increase their own safety? And that is not a clinical evaluation. At all. It is your emotional response to someone possibly thinking you might be a danger to them that has you trying to police this. You aren’t a dispassionate observer. You are upset about it. Men “should” work to create an environment where such sentiments are unnecessary. And women’s thought processes about how they protect themselves is far more important than how men “should” take this is silly. Women have been thinking this way since basically forever. You only just noticed it. Women typically don’t share these kinds of things with men because they usually react the way you are right now. That is why you didn’t hear about it until now. And again, it is factually correct. The offense you are taking is what you are putting into those words. You aren’t accepting the “clear and ambiguous” statement. You are accepting the hurt and victimization you feel as somehow “clear and ambiguous” because you don’t like how women choose to frame their own safety because it hurts your feelings. You aren’t being dispassionate. You are prioritizing your own emotional reaction over any other impact the statement might have. This is what people mean when they talk about “fragility”.

No, that is explained mostly by my ADHD and anxiety and from seeking approval in all the wrong places.

Nope, spent my time with The Wicked Branch.

The new rule is you can play for four seasons over a period of five years with much more limited waivers. The shift to profit sharing with the athletes (about time1) means many students have an incentive to delay leaving college to make more money. This is designed to cut down on older players crowding out new ones by staying longer. The new rules will probably face some court challenges.

Except it is not. I think the most common response from a black guy would be something like, “Oh, it must be a day of the week that ends in a ‘y’.” This isn’t some absurd hypothetical. It is a lived reality and it is often much more than “potential”. It is more often “probable” or even “certainly”. That you don’t seem to realize how offensive and weird this is is unsurprising after you seemed surprised/shocked that women regularly have to take care around men. It doesn’t impact you so you don’t know about it. This is what you don’t get. The “men are potential rapists” bit isn’t an aggressive statement that hurts or marginalizes men. Women are not weaponizing this to hurt men. The phrase “all black men are potential rapists” was and is regularly and actively weaponized to harm the innocent. One of the precipitating incidents of the Civil Rights Movement kicking off in earnest was that a black man was murdered because a white woman said he had whistled at her in a suggestive manner. On her death bed she recanted. The murderers got off without punishment despite overwhelming evidence. This was not an isolated incident and still is not. There was a quasi-joke on social media a while back about if you are a minority man and you see a white woman crying at a party to leave immediately leave and buy something traceable with a credit card on the way home as an alibi that you left and keep that receipt. Do you see how vile this comparison is based on historical and current realities? Okay, brass tacks here. Do you feel that women’s attempts to defend themselves against potential harm are aggressive? In other words do they have a negative impact on men? Your reasoning in this thread suggests that it doesn’t beyond some vague ‘hurting their feelings’ or something like that and a peripheral concern that living like that is probably not emotionally healthy for women. Again, how are men victimized by this? You were surprised to learn women think this way so it clearly wasn’t actively hurting you was it? So where is the harm? Which is why women have to be careful around men they know fairly well too. Also while they do usually know the victim this includes acquaintances and friends of friends and the like. There is a lot of space between stranger attacking at random and close friend you have known for years and have a lot of trust towards. Such as what? Again, the adverse effects don’t seem to have impacted you since you didn’t even know about this.

In practice though prophetic leadership trumps all the others at least on a communal level. The others are encouraged only insofar as they bring you into compliance with prophetic leadership.

Yes and yes. I don’t think it inherently knows right from wrong. If there is no divine design then it is a combination of advantageous instincts and drives and combined with that I picked up from the culture I live in. I’d probably be very gullible. I’d like a heavy dose of rationality combined with that deliciousness. I’d like to believe all kinds of things are true that just aren’t.

My grandpa was a stake president in California back in the 70s and can confirm they were very rogue. He added an eleventh commandment for his stake.

The first secularists in the societies most of us inhabit were Christians who found their belief system unsustainable. There is a Christian narrative that secularism is an external force. The first scholars who found huge problems with biblical accounts being historical were Christians trying to support Christianity but the data didn’t back up a lot of the hypotheses. When things that were inexplicable became more explainable Christianity had to retrench. It stopped being the default. Fundamentalism is a reaction to things like Darwin and biblical archaeology. Islamic fundamentalism has very similar roots.